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HotSchedules has become a reliable solution for businesses in various industries, including restaurants, amusement parks, resorts, and …
Overview
What is HotSchedules?
HotSchedules is a cloud-based scheduling, labor and communication management software solution serving the restaurant and hospitality industry.According to the vendor, key benefits include:Build & Communicate SchedulesThe scheduling and labor management software reduces the time it takes managers to create and…
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What is HotSchedules?
HotSchedules is a cloud-based scheduling, labor and communication management software solution serving the restaurant and hospitality industry. According to the vendor, key benefits include: Build & Communicate Schedules The scheduling and labor management…
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7shifts is a restaurant workforce and scheduling management application, which also features collaboration features, from the Canadian company of the same name.
What is Lightspeed Restaurant?
The Lightspeed Restaurant POS, from Lightspeed in Montreal, is a restaurant POS and management system designed to enable users to sync the user's menu with major food delivery apps, manage all orders and and reach new customers.
Product Demos
HotSchedules Demo: The Employee Experience
YouTube
HotSchedules Demo: Creating a New Schedule
YouTube
Demo of Red Book Keep
YouTube
HotSchedules Demo: Navigating the Schedule
YouTube
HotSchedules Demo: Employee Shift Release & Pick-Up
YouTube
HotSchedules Demo: Submitting Time-Off Requests
YouTube
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
What is HotSchedules?
HotSchedules is a cloud-based scheduling, labor and communication management software solution serving the restaurant and hospitality industry.
According to the vendor, key benefits include:
Build & Communicate Schedules
The scheduling and labor management software reduces the time it takes managers to create and communicate schedules. All scheduling and employee information is stored in one central location, so managers have access to time-off requests, availability, skill level, and certification compliance.
Work Schedule AppThe HotSchedules mobile app lets employees check their schedule, request time off, swap shifts, manage availability, and send messages. All shift requests require a manager's approval.
Forecasting and ReportingWhen integrated with the POS, the tool pulls time and attendance, sales and guest data into the system. The forecasting engine shows past sales trends, which makes it possible to build schedules with the right amount of labor. There are also over 40 reports.
Multi-Unit Store ViewThe Above Store Console provides reporting and visibility across stores, anywhere and at any time. It can be configured by region, state, country.
Bilingual App & SupportThe mobile app is available in English & Spanish. Employees can call into the AVS or Customer Support Center to get their schedule in English or Spanish - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
HotSchedules Features
- Supported: Online Scheduler
- Supported: Time-Off and Availbility
- Supported: Work Schedule Mobile App
- Supported: Scheduling Templates
- Supported: Employee/Staff Communication
- Supported: Sales and Labor
- Supported: Forecasting Engine
- Supported: Reporting
- Supported: Point-of-Sale Integration
- Supported: Centralized Communication
- Supported: SMS Messaging
HotSchedules Screenshots
HotSchedules Video
HotSchedules Competitors
- When I Work
- ScheduleFly
- Crunchtime
HotSchedules Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Mobile Web |
| Supported Languages | English, Spanish |
HotSchedules Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
When I Work and ScheduleFly are common alternatives for HotSchedules.
Reviewers rate Usability and Support Rating highest, with a score of 8.9.
The most common users of HotSchedules are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Recommendations
HotSchedules has become a reliable solution for businesses in various industries, including restaurants, amusement parks, resorts, and retail establishments. Users have reported significant time savings and improved efficiency in scheduling processes. For example, a restaurant manager praises HotSchedules for reducing their scheduling time from over 3 hours to just 30 minutes per week. This software enables employees to cover their own shifts with approval, allowing for better shift management and flexibility. It facilitates communication among team members, ensuring constant checking and trading of shifts in an amusement park setting. Multiple departments at a resort rely on the platform to handle last-minute schedule changes, call-offs, and requests for added shifts.
HotSchedules assists food and beverage departments by providing easy access to availability, time off requests, and labor forecasting. This improves communication between staff and management. The software's user-friendly interface allows for generating and posting weekly schedules effortlessly. It also serves as a means of communication with staff members across multiple locations within a restaurant group.
Moreover, HotSchedules Train formerly Schoox is utilized for employee orientation and training purposes. The software not only helps with controlling labor costs but also offers features like sales forecasting and labor cost analysis. Across organizations, HotSchedules proves valuable by assisting in proper staffing needs and managing labor expenses effectively. In retail settings, the product streamlines employee scheduling while enabling them to view their schedules easily and make shift swaps when necessary.
In conclusion, HotSchedules is highly regarded for its ability to save time, improve communication, increase flexibility in scheduling processes, and provide various features that benefit different departments within organizations. Its broad range of applications makes it suitable for businesses of all sizes across multiple industries.
Users highly recommend signing up for HotSchedules and getting familiar with the application. They also suggest using the convenient mobile app and setting up email notifications for easy access to schedules and efficient shift swapping. Additionally, users highly recommend HotSchedules as a reliable solution for scheduling needs in various work environments. Overall, they find HotSchedules to be a valuable tool for controlling expenses, allocating labor, improving communication, and making positive changes within the service industry.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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May 10, 2017
HotSchedules Review
We use HotSchedules for our entire restaurant. It helps alleviate scheduling issues, shift swaps between employees, and communication between managers.
- Organization of employees and their information
- Ease of generating multiple schedules in multiple facets of the restaurant
- Ease of communication between managers and employees
- I don't have any ideas for improvements. Everything works great for my use.
We currently use HotSchedules to schedule and manage employees' schedules. We have 6 departments that use the program with a management team that oversees the company-wide scheduling. HotSchedules allows the employee to have a constant digital link to their schedule as well as documentation about changes and requests.
- Distrubation of schedule to employees.
- Managing employee requests.
- Mainting a running log of restaurant activities.
- It has more than lived up to what was advertised.
We use the application across the whole business, it provides scheduling updates, messaging, availability, communication, reporting, daily logs, employee reviews, percentage and productivity based scheduling, and forecasting. We use almost all of the aspects of the system to integrate with our POS and employees and provide a digital database for records and follow up.
- Provides real-time schedule updates.
- Uses data to provide sales based scheduling.
- Is user-friendly and the IT support is very personal.
- Integration with Retention POS sales, employee info, etc.
- Providing more of an open sales data reporting for businesses open past 12 am.
- More communication during the process of fixing integration and coding issues with businesses experiencing issues between POS and HotSchedules.
May 08, 2017
Communication is Key
HotSchedules is used by every team member within my business. With 70+ team members with different availabilities, varying requests off, varying skills levels, etc., it helps us manage the chaos. It provides more predictability with the schedule from week to week. With HotSchedules, the schedule is always up to date. It also a great tool to facilitate communication.
- The app gives everyone the information they need at their fingertips.
- Changes to the schedule are very easy, allowing swaps and ensuring proper approvals.
- Templates provide scheduling consistency from week to week.
- I would like to have an option on the app where you can select a team member and have their schedule for the entire week displayed.
- The staff availability report has not worked reliably for me. It would very useful if it did.
- The schedule filtering has been buggy as of late.
- Taking into account not just team member availabilities, but also when they would prefer to work.
We utilize HotSchedules for managing and maintaining our front of the house staff (Servers, Bartenders, Floor Managers, etc). HotSchedules allows for the easy dissemination of the schedule to the staff, while providing the flexibility for them to request time off, swap shifts, pickup/release shifts, and set/change availability. With the advent of smart devices and the app, I have my entire front of the house staffs information available to me at fingertips to include email, phone & text, full roster, and the ability to address everyone as a whole or as an individual. As a manager I not only have control over the approvals, but I also have the ability to justify the with the individual why a request off or swap would not be approved, which keeps an open dialog with the employee reducing confusion and workplace conflict. HotSchedules also allows management to track employee hours, so as schedules change due to swaps and pickups we are able to better control and determine labor.
- Dissemination of schedule to all individuals on staff using HotSchedules.
- Allows staff to have flexibility in their schedule while ensuring that shifts are covered.
- As changes/approvals are made the system updates, allowing for everyone to look at the schedule as it is in its current form.
- As far as my experience with the system goes, it does not have a backlog of who does approvals. This would be helpful as, with a management team that also has approval authority, it would allow you to see who is authorizing changes to the schedule.
- Having the ability to send attachments through the email system would help greatly in being able to spread much needed information to the staff (new menus, upcoming event information, picture attachments, etc.).
- Being able to set [parameters] for things like the maximum number of approvals reached would be helpful and give employees an immediate feedback letting them know that max number of staff has been reached that can request off for a particular day. It would help both ways by stopping someone with approval authority from accidentally approving too many request offs.
May 05, 2017
Your time matters with HotSchedules
We use only HotSchedules for all employee scheduling. We also use it for communicating between management and to forecast labor costs. After 9 years, HotSchedules has become invaluable to our organization and we encourage all new employees to become fluent in its processes.
- Employee interaction- they have control over their own trades
- Schedule writing- it makes scheduling easy and time efficient
- They could be integrated with more POS systems- most exclusively REVEL.
May 05, 2017
HotSchedules, you're the best around!
HotSchedules is being used in our individual venues with an Above Store Counsel set up for our corporate execs. We have 5 restaurants and 2 hotels in the division I work in. HotSchedules is mostly used for its scheduling, log book, staff journal, and sales/labor forecasting. Since implementing HotSchedules, it has allowed us to maintain labor budgets, and ultimately, function much more efficiently by way of staffing and increasing managerial communication.
- Manager Log and Staff Journal -- increases more effective communication as well as keeps corporate folks in the loop and able to identify problem areas much more easily (and proactively).
- Sales and Labor Forecasting - allows us to maintain appropriate labor levels according to budget.
- I really wish we could upload PDFs in the staff journal. We would likely replace much of our HR practices if we were able to upload reviews and progressive discipline documentation.
HotSchedules is implemented across our company, a multi-unit corporation, as it allows for a stream lined approach to immediate communication, scheduling, and labor management with our entire team. HotSchedules allows for immediate access to all of our locations no matter where I am located. The ease of communication with specific staff members or our entire employee roster with one simple click and a few minutes of typing compared to the hours it would typically take without such a platform is a great time saver.
- Streamlines communication and scheduling staff. Once you truly understand the capabilities of the HotSchedule platform and train your staff on the ease of using it, management saves hours of work each and every week. Management can then have more time to truly manage.
- Employees will be able to arrange schedule swaps, change availability, and communicate with one another all in one location. Obviously management must approve said changes, however it is no longer managements responsibility to make these changes, remember requests, availability changes, that is all done, saved, and implemented for them.
- The customer care team at HotSchedules has always been helpful and a pleasure to work with. This is not a company that is willing to take your money, but provide no service to its customers.
- The messaging system should be able to send attachments such as pdf's to make distribution of company materials easier. Whenever we do a menu change, it would be very helpful to have the ability to drop a pdf version of the menu into a company wide message.
- The scheduler should be available through their mobile application platform. The application is great, however it would be more convenient to be able to create schedules from said platform rather than needing to log in from a standard web browser
- The scheduler is not compatible with apple/OsX commands or the scroll up/down in a web browser. Windows platform is works seamlessly, however the use of Apple products can be less than easy when utilizing the scheduler to its fullest capacity.
May 03, 2017
HotSchedules is a great tool
Amazing product, easy to use for the restaurant industry when the majority of your employees are part time. Part-timers always have days off and other jobs to worry about. This makes it easy to load their availability and to request days off. As an owner, I always know who is working for anywhere in the world.
- Scheduling employees
- Employee availability
- Mobile app for everyone to use
- Customer service is great
- The tablet app needs some work.
- Every once in a while updating schedules gets lost. This only happens while you a working on it.
- Messaging - I wish they would do group direct text messages.
April 28, 2017
Old fart gets technological
We use it mainly for primary scheduling and allowing staff to make shift changes, update their availability and view schedules electronically. It is also a great way to track and manage requests for time off. Right now we have not delved into the features also available for tracking dollars and labor.
- Scheduling
- Managing shift switch requests
- Managing time off requests
- Sometimes I feel the interface is a little clunky. It would be easier if I could make changes to employees with fewer steps.
- Easier to use on an Ipad.
We use Hotschedules at all of our company stores mostly to facilitate staff scheduling. It helps write more efficient schedules, and gives employees easy access and control over swapping shifts, submitting requests, and a means to contact one another. Hotschedules also helps managers track staff certifications and provides a digital logbook for communication. It also provides a means for staffing and training as well.
- Scheduling
- Certification tracking
- Logbook
- Website functionality is less efficient day to day compared to mobile app.
- Website is less aesthetically pleasing and awkwardly laid out.
- Customer service needs a lot of improvement.
April 26, 2017
Certification tracking
We currently use HotSchedules for both creating schedules and food handler tracking. It has been an asset in staying on top of tracking employees food safe certificates. It's being used across the whole organization and helps us keep track of 150+ employees. This system all helps us manage schedules that are ever changing and can begin at any time in a 24 hour period.
- Food Handler Tracking
- Scheduling
- Reporting
- I would like it if it was a little more robust with employee management.
- I would like it if the system could in some way track an employees' absence with a scheduled day.
We post schedules weekly, allow employees to use the request off/on tool, send messages to other employees in their job code or to management, and we send out a weekly employee newsletter. The most recent update to the Scheduling tab made scheduling more difficult because some features were removed, but overall we are happy with HotSchedules.
- Employees may pick up or swap shifts, and get manager approval through HotSchedules, making schedule management quick and easy.
- Schedules can be worked on by multiple people and saved automatically as you work.
- There are reports to track overtime and labor costs.
- I would like to be able to write in notes on the schedule for certain days, like local events or holidays that require schedule adjustments.
- I would like more functionality with messages, including being able to mark a message as "unread" or flag it to a certain category.
- I would like to be able to see the date someone made a request off by paging over it in the scheduling module. Currently I have to run a separate report to see this.
April 26, 2017
Positive, but simple review
It is used as our main tool for scheduling and mass written communication. It provides ease of access and scheduling.
- Accessibility of schedule
- Efficiency of user needs
- Communication tool
- Pricing - competition like CTUIT providing comparable service for less
- Ease of print functions
April 25, 2017
Must Try!!!
We currently use HotSchedules as our scheduling managing system. I manage a team of about 40 employees. As each employee has their own login details it gives them access to their account online. We also use HotSchedules inventory and training systems.
- Detailed Reports
- Great Tech Support
- Syncing data from our POS System
April 25, 2017
Love the freedom HotSchedules give my team!
We have two restaurants. We use Hotschedules for everyone employed in those restaurants, both front and back of house. It makes it very easy to coordinate everyone's schedules and no one can use the excuse that they didn't know they were scheduled.
- Easy to use scheduling.
- Up to date roster of employees with phone numbers.
- Phone app that is VERY easy to use.
- Reports that give a lot of info which is very helpful.
- The scheduling feature was, in my opinion, easier to use before the update.
- I would like the ability to access both my restaurants on my phone app.
April 24, 2017
No more scheduling blind!
We currently have four full-service upscale restaurants in Northern California. We use Hotschedules at all four restaurants for all of our scheduling needs. We have been a customer since 2009. Hotschedules has given our team members easy access to schedules, requests, swapping shifts and much more. Our managers use Hotschedules for budgeting, store wide communication and tracking good handler certifications.
- Scheduling - Makes scheduling large staffs much easier and gives our team members 24-hour access to their schedules.
- Budgeting - Provides the tools and information for writing schedules that show your budgeted labor dollars.
- Communication - Allows you to communicate with individual team members or with your entire staff.
- Food Handlers Cards - Tracks expiration dates of all team members good handlers' cards.
- More Seemless Connection with Aloha - It would be nice if linking Aloha and Hotschedules was an easy process.
- Job Codes and Permissions - I have always struggled with setting permissions and job codes for team members. It's a confusing process.
April 24, 2017
HotSchedules for a Deli
We use it at all 5 of our stores. A manager makes the schedules weekly and posts them every Friday. The main issue it helps us with is pre-controlling labor. The overtime alerts are valuable along with the weekly labor budgeting process.
- Again, valuable tool to pre-control labor. We can target our exact labor % for the next week.
- Schedule swaps are extremely easy with the app along with contact info for each teammember in 1 place.
- Roster checks and the days line up are readily available for every manager via the app.
- Support and help are off the charts.
- Team members can check schedules on line or 1-800.
- An easier report of Actual vs Scheduled for an individual team member with user defined dates.
- A way for management to populate team members contact info with photos.
April 21, 2017
Hot Schedules is a Managers Dream
HotSchedules is used company wide to schedule daily shifts for the Front of House and Back of House. The HS platform allows for convenience and efficiency to communicate effectively with employees for scheduling, mass email, employee availability, and shift trades. HS eliminates confusion with its centralized communication center. Furthermore, the connectivity with our POS system assists with budget projections and labor costs.
- Centralized Scheduling System
- Mass Email Communication
- Shift Trades
- Functionality was improved greatly with last update!
April 13, 2017
Great reporting from HotSchedules!
Single restaurant location. [We use HotSchedules for] Scheduling, labor reporting and sales projections.
- Sales projections - tend to be pretty accurate and great that you can choose weeks used for said projections.
- Labor reports - great way to dig into where dollars are being spent.
- Reporting tools - very useful and great scope of reporting available.
- The new scheduler takes a bit to learn.
- When updates are made via the POS in the restaurant it is annoying you have to log out and back in to see said changes. Wish there was a way to simply refresh instead.
April 13, 2017
Stay in the know with Hotschedules!!
We use HotSchedules for the daily in and out operations of a big restaurant. It cut our time creating schedules in half.
- Clearly provides a full proof solution for employees to get their schedules.
- Provides great reminders for any type of certifications.
- A great way to manage requests for time off.
- I would like to know who requested a certain date off first. It was a function you used to have.
- I feel like there should be a easier way to plug in missing shifts.
April 11, 2017
Quality Product
We are currently a stand alone restaurant and have used HS for about 5 years at the location. It's being used by all FOH staff and management currently.
- Overall schedule management
- Logbook
- Employee engagement
- Labor forecasting
- New scheduler layout
April 10, 2017
HotSchedules Review
HotSchedules is phenomenal for employees and their app is amazing. However, the scheduler for our specific purposes wasn't too manager friendly. They recently updated hotschedules and they took away some of the good functionality that is used to have; as well as the program had some glitches that were really frustrating. Overall hotschedules is great for your base level employees and alright for your managers.
- App is awesome with great functionality
- Customer service is excellent.
- Scheduler can be difficult for managers.
- Some minor glitches that cause shifts to disappear.
- Shift trades hardly ever work.
April 05, 2017
Big Fans of HotSchedules
We use HotSchedules for day-to-day scheduling, labor management, and planning.
- Reporting labor variances
- Scheduling
- Shift overview and communication to staff
- We were very excited at the prospect of KPI performance reporting. We understand that is in progress.
April 04, 2017
Must have for even the smallest business
We use HotSchedules for all front of house staff scheduling. HotSchedules addresses employee shift swaps, pickups, time off requests.
- Customer service in regards to trouble shooting technical issues.
- Customer service for answering any questions employees or managers may have.
- Training on the use & functions of HotSchedules.
- Sometimes the HotSchedules system goes down for no apparent reason.
- The updated scheduler interface is sometimes confusing.
- The updated employee requested time off interface is more confusing and difficult to understand now than it used to be.